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In Memorium
Steve Hall
1944 – 2022
Steve Hall wrote a brief summary of his life for our class newsletter, Highlander Echoes, in early 1999. “I guess it’s not going to get any easier to encapsulate my life since leaving Piedmont, so I might as well just give it a try. I currently live (in a house we built ourselves) in Boonville, California with my wife Pippa and our 15-year-old son Deneb. I do woodwork in my shop, garden, cook, read, sing, and mess around in local politics. How did I get here, though?
“I went to UCSB and got a degree in English lit. I then sallied forth into the Peace Corps, in Micronesia, which seemed at the time, and still seems, to be a major formative experience. I returned more impressed with the subsistence village life I had experienced than with the life by which I had grown up surrounded [by]. After an attempt to create some semblance of a career direction and momentum (graduate school at S.F. State in Film, which ended when the film department walked out over Nixon's bombing of Cambodia), I started doing what I suspect most people do, making decisions that fulfilled more immediate needs, and letting the career find itself. The pattern that emerged for a dozen years or so was one of the alternating stints of working as a yacht refinisher, carpenter, and cabinetmaker with a series of long, necessarily low-budget, trips to interesting places.
“I met my wife, Pippa, in Rio on the second of those trips, and we traveled together subsequently. With the birth of Deneb this pattern slowly began to change, or at least the type of trip we took changed. When Deneb was 3 or 4, we packed up all our stuff in shipping containers, sublet the shack in Mill Valley we had managed to hold on to through multiple trips, and head for Zimbabwe, where Pippa was raised. The intention was to find a niche for ourselves, if possible, in the hopeful new multi-racial, post-colonial, post-revolutionary society. It didn't work. The life, there and then, was lovely, but the government was a pain in the backside about my status as an immigrant. Looking at the situation there now, it seems we were lucky, but at the time it was pretty painful. The upheaval from that became the impulse to find a place out of the Bay Area (we had looked over the years, but I suppose we weren't ready), and we bought this land in 1988 and started clearing it.
“In 1989 we moved into a trailer on the land, having put in a well, septic system and electricity, and started building. Fifteen fairly arduous months later we got rid of the trailer and moved into the house. Years have gone by.” In 2004 he updated us about his efforts at preserving the character of Mendocino County and working to adopt “more stringent planning regulations, specifically adoption of a grading ordinance. A grading ordinance regulates the operation of the heavy equipment used to move and reshape earth, grade earth for building sites, and cut and fill the land. What that comes down to is regulating where grading can occur, protecting the area near streams and its vegetation, for example, and how it’s done, thereby reducing erosion and sedimentation. Both will hopefully result in streams that again support salmon and steelhead in the numbers that used to be there and protect natural habitat from willy-nilly destruction. This runs up against the forces of development and vineyard expansion. The latter has been horrific in the last few years, though less at the moment because the cost of grapes went down. So far, Mendocino County has been spared the worst of the strip mall development, but it’s only a matter of time.
“This is something, specifically, that I've been working on for a few years. (The more general goals I've been chasing for more than a dozen years.) This has involved a grand jury complaint to get the Board of Supervisors to honor the General Plan, a lawsuit that's still in the wings if all else fails, sitting on an ad hoc, Supervisors' appointed committee for hundreds of hours over a year and a half, and going to Planning Commission meetings for the last year and a half. That body is not friendly to environmental regulation, so we'll have several moves to go after they're done, at which point the balance, hopefully, will tip our way at the Board of Supervisors.”
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Don Lytle
Steve, was a wonderful and inspiring friend for me and so many of our Havens and Piedmont classmates. The times we shared from scouting and sharing meals to youthful playing to leaping off his garage into sponge ivy were rich growing experiences. (Whenever I hear Guy Clark singing about "The Cape" I remember those feelings of 'death-defying' leaps of faith.) One boyhood experience that Steve and I shared was an afternoon of philosophical exploration. As we lounged in bunk beds, him above and me below, we started talking about life and the meaning of living. Although we were young teenagers, the conversation was powerfully sophisticated and circumspective. It was wonderful that Steve sought and achieved a life of meaning through his relationships, marriage, fatherhood, and environmental activism.
Thank you Steve Channing Hall for being in our lives . . .
Peggy Burns (Holt)
Oh My God! I am so saddened by this news.
I was hoping, once again, to try to talk Steve into coming to our reunion. I tried repeatedly to get him to join any of us old souls at a reunion !! Steve staunchly refused, as he preferred to meet individually or in a small group with people to connect, not to just socialize.
So, as I had tracked him down several years ago when my oldest son and family moved to Santa Rosa, that's what we did.....we got together several times in these past 7 years and had LONG, wonderful talks about our experiences as high schoolers, as college kids (we both attended UCSB where we remained good friends) and as parents and aging adults!!
I remember the first time we arranged to meet up. So funny.... I arrived a little early (a miracle for me). And, as I sat waiting for Steve at an outdoor cafe across the street from a little park( it dawned on me that I hadn't a clue what he might look like and I might have to go around stopping strangers to ask if they were Steve!! Luckily, I needn't have worried. He looked just the same, and we both laughed at the fact we actually looked like "ourselves".
Steve Hall was a refelective, brilliant, complex, funny and eminently interesting human being . He was so as a young adult and his depth only grew over the years. Our last 2 visits ( the last one about a year before the pandemic) took place after he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's. He said, he and his wife, Pippa, walked daily as that was helpful with Parkinson's, and he had cut gluten out of his diet... not sure if it helped, but he felt better gluten free he said. In any case, I was going to get ahold of him this next week as I was anxious to reconnect.
I'm so sad that I didn't reach out sooner. I had not heard anything of his passing till I saw this Piedmont High announcement.
Our classmate, Steve, was a boy and a man of intelligence, decency and an high moral standards. He had an ethical concern for mankind and the world in which we live . In this era, those qualities strike me as characteristics which are in peril and at a premium!!!
Rest In Peace dear Steve Hall